Pulitzer Prize winner Michael D’Antonio’s new book “Mortal Sins” will
be the gold standard for unraveling what happened during the Catholic
priests’ sex abuse scandal of the last three decades.

D’Antonio’s
balanced exposition and analysis is the equivalent of a cleansing shower
on a disturbing period in church history that will reverberate for 100
years or more.

The monumentality of the evil laid out in “Mortal
Sins” will gag readers. While there is no prurience in the writing, the
matter-of-factness of the sexual activity is jaw-dropping.

The crimes
documented include a fact pattern of enormous proportion. The doggedness
of those who pursued justice is admirable.

In “Mortal Sins” D’Antonio makes the case that:

• The abuse scandal is the product of the church’s culture of secrecy and sexual blackmail.

•
Three Americans – lawyer Jeff Anderson, priest Thomas Doyle and victim
Barbara Blaine – are responsible for creating a worldwide movement that
has seen hundreds of priests convicted of crimes and more than $3
billion paid to people who were abused as children, with countless more
claims unresolved.

• Disillusioned church members and the financial burden have forced the closing of almost 1,400 parishes in the United States.

•
The victim/heroes include deaf children abused and ignored by hundreds
as well as raped and molested girls and boys who became unyielding
opponents of the church as adults.

• Abuse crises throughout the
world – in the United States, Canada, Ireland, on the European continent
and elsewhere – have created public outrage.

• Victims have caught church officials at the highest levels in cover-ups and other attempts to avoid responsibility.

•
Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, Emeritus, handled abuse cases
for 20 years as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
and allowed many perpetrators to escape sanction.

• The emotion
which energized those who organized a concerted attack on Rome was
inspired not by hatred but by anger over the crimes that had been
committed, by empathy for victims, and by a fierce commitment to
exposing the truth.

This is the point where the reviewer – for the
sake of balance – might ordinarily insert remarks that show how much
good the church has done over centuries.

The church’s claim to moral
supremacy, upon which it bases its authority, has had a sad, scandalous
slide downhill over the past 50 years.

“Mortal Sins” reads like a
detective story. Start with a hot summer day in 1984, when Cardinal Pio
Laghi, the Vatican’s handsome ambassador to Washington, began his daily
staff meeting, which he called “la congressa,” with a number of items
on his agenda.

One of the items was a letter that Laghi passed
along, explaining that it was a sensitive problem to his American
assistant, Father Thomas Doyle. Doyle was a 39-year-old with a “bushel
full of advanced degrees.”

The letter, from Monsignor Henri Larroque of
Lafayette, La., “… noted a multimillion-dollar payment he had to settle
lawsuits filed by the parents of several boys who had been sexually
assaulted by a local priest named Gilbert Gauthe.”

But that wasn’t
the way that parents of a sexually abused child reacted. Fortunately
for the world, the parents of Scott, Glen and Faye Gastal, did not
accept the provision of their financial payment by the diocese that they
keep quiet. Instead they hired a fellow Cajun, J. Minos Simon, to
represent them.

When
Bishop Frey received notice that the Gastals were suing the Louisiana
diocese, he sent another report to Laghi. Laghi couldn’t figure this
out, as in his experience such cases were always handled privately.

Doyle told him, “You don’t understand. In America, this can happen.”

Laghi asked for more detail but apparently wasn’t too bothered by the
case.

The Gastals eventually won a large jury award, and Gauthe
went to jail for years.

Lawyer Simon’s success with the case prompted a
call from Minnesota lawyer Jeffrey Anderson, who had hoped to pick up
some tips about suing the Catholic Church.

In 1984, Anderson
received a case referral from a lawyer friend, Tom Krauel. It involved
the case of a troubled teenager, Greg Lyman, who was in state prison.

Greg
earlier committed a burglary and exposed himself to two young girls,
ages 7 and 4.

Greg’s parents had a friend, Father Tom Adamson, who
worked at St. Thomas Aquinas Church in St. Paul Park. He was a charming,
intelligent and athletic man.

Greg had become an altar boy at Adamson’s
suggestion. Reader, you can guess where this story is going. In a steam
room at a gym, the priest masturbated the boy and told him, “Don’t tell
anybody. You’ll get in trouble and so will I.”

When Greg’s
parents found out, they contacted Krauel, who referred the case to
Anderson. Bishop Robert Carlson of the St. Paul archdiocese met with the
parents and the boy. A few days later, a $1,600 check arrived in the
mail. The Lymans didn’t know what to do with it.

Eventually they
retained Anderson, suing the diocese for compensation that would pay for
their son’s psychological care and recognize their own pain and
suffering. They also wanted to make the church think twice about
covering up for pedophile priests.

Meanwhile, more complaints about
pedophile priests surfaced. Father Doyle contacted Father Michael
Peterson, a priest psychiatrist who ran a small mental treatment center
for clergy, St. Luke’s, outside Washington, D.C., in Maryland. His was
one of a number of centers that offered quiet care to ordained men
across the country.

Peterson confided to Doyle “that in the past,
priests and bishops with sexual problems were routinely diagnosed with
depression, alcoholism, or some other, less stigmatizing problem.”

But
the facts were otherwise. So much so that Pope Paul VI in 1969 had
consulted directly with Dutch psychiatrist Anna Terruwe about a
worrisome number of his priests’ emotional lives, according to
D’Antonio. She found a high rate of immaturity among Catholic priests
and estimated that as many as 25 percent suffered from serious
psychiatric illness.

An American colleague of Terruwe, Conrad
Baars, reported that “Priests in general … possess an insufficiently
developed or distorted emotional life.”

Addressing America’s bishops in
1971, Baars warned that some men joined the priesthood to “make amends
for past sexual sins … the consequences of the system have been largely
disastrous,” he concluded.

As D’Antonio puts it, “In a few years’
time the exposure of the depth of deception practiced by bishops would
change public attitudes toward church authority.”

Richard Sipe, a
former Benedictine priest, conducted numerous studies that indicated “a
vast system of clerical blackmail that served, in a perverse way, to
strengthen the clerical culture.

Under these conditions, priests who had
sex of any kind, even alone, routinely confessed and sought absolution
from each other … the guarantee of forgiveness meant that priests were
united in their secrecy.” His 1990 book, “A Secret World: Sexuality and
the Search for Celibacy,” set out his findings with considerable nuance.

When
Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law first spoke of yet another scandal
uncovered, the sexual abuse in the 1960s of multiple young victims by
the Rev. James Porter, he said: “I’m absolutely fed up with the media
coverage of this case of 25 years ago.”

He added, “By all means we call
down God’s power in the media, particularly the (Boston) Globe.”

The
Globe, undeterred, continued to run stories of priestly abuse, reporting
on Father John Geoghan who was defrocked in 1998 after abusing
“hundreds of children of various ages.”

In this case, the Boston
archdiocese agreed to a settlement of $30 million to certain clients.

This was before another archdiocesan priest, Father Paul Shanley, was
engaging in deviant behavior. For decades, D’Antonio writes, “high
church officials, including Law, knew of complaints against Shanley - 26
in all - and continued to promote him …”

Barbara Blaine, the
third hero in this story, was an admirer of Dorothy Day, founder of the
Catholic Worker Movement. Blaine worked night and day in the 1980s on
Chicago’s impoverished South Side, “standing for life,” as Chicago’s
Cardinal Joseph Bernadin had requested.

Blaine remodeled an abandoned
convent to serve the poor. She also sought psychotherapy after she was
sexually assaulted by the Rev. Chet Warren, an Oblate of St. Francis de
Sales in Toledo, who blamed her, a 13-year-old at the time, for his
rapaciousness.

Over time, Blaine became part of a network,
Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), which became a
touchstone of information and mutual support nationally.

There are
many more sex crime cases recounted in “Mortal Sins.”

It is filled with
a good journalist’s honest reports of a huge scandal that was so broad
and diffuse that it took years to unfold. Cardinals’ memories are
especially pliant.

Cardinal Roger Mahoney’s recollection, for example,
is described as faltering more than 70 times, using the words, “I don’t
recall” during his deposition involving claims made against priests
under his jurisdiction.

It will take years to undo at least some of the harm, perhaps the most severe since the Reformation.

Can
it be remedied?

Pope Francis, who has indicated a preference for the
poor and dispossessed, offers the chance of a renewal of the church; a
new dawn, not, one hopes, the liminal light of sunset, as he deals with
this scandal.

Pope Francis

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Welcome to my Blog! A life long Catholic from Orange County, California. As we all know, the American family in the United States is under Attack from every direction, ...Politically, Morally, and Spiritually that our Country and Church is Truly Facing a test of Survival! I hope this site is a place of interest for you, where you will find Ideas, Information on our Catholic Faith, Prayer and Global Events around Us!

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